The Omni Group is an award-winning group of developers who have created a suite of productivity apps for the Mac, iPhone and iPad. Over the years, their stable of applications has garnered high praise for their sophistication, quality and functionality.

Features

Admittedly, I am an unabashed productivity geek. I am always on the look-out for applications that serve to streamline and ultimately improve my productivity aiding me in putting out timely, quality output. Over the years, I have bought and downloaded a lion's share of outliner apps for my numerous iDevices. However, I have never seen an outliner app that is on par with OmniOutliner. While listing many of the app's functionality on paper may mirror some features found currently in similar apps on the market today, the Omni Group's presentation and execution are what separates it from the pack.

Unlike most other outliners, the OmniOutliner end products look like highly-stylized Word documents. Aside from the grouping convention highlighted by the leftmost margin which allows users to effortlessly expand or contract, indent or out-dent sentences, the rest of the page appears clean and open, sans ledger-colored rows or segmentation. One can easily forget that the document being written is actually using an outliner app rather than a word processor software. However, if one prefers to frame their content with a ledger-like appearance, OmniOutliner provides a host of cool options enabling the user to customize their individual style by choosing the font type and point, text color, background color and numbering, to name a few.

OmniOutliner enables seamless inline editing for individual rows or groups of rows. Additionally, headers can be retitled and tailor-made columns can be created and aligned to your liking. OmniOutliner allows users to insert images by copying from the iPad's stock photo application and directly pasting the image inline. While this accomplished the task, it was quite cumbersome and left me surprised given the quality and sophistication of the entire app.

One other minor complaint I experienced appeared when I was testing the app's numbering convention, by allowing the app to enumerate in ascending order as I added more rows. I found that sometimes the numbering adornments didn't persist throughout the entire document. For example, if one row enumerated (3), the next row would simply be 4 rather than the expected (4).

There are a host of sharing options available including syncing with OmniOutliner's sister companion for the Mac, import and export via iDisk, WebDav, and email. Additional formats includee OPML, HTML (including dynamic HTML) or plain text.

Graphics

OmniOutliner has recently upgraded support for retina displays and hi-res images can now be clearly viewed. A number of templates are included to get you off and running once your feet hit the ground.

Conclusion

OmniOutliner is the most feature-rich, highly-stylized and sophisticated outliner app on the market today. I can unabashedly admit that it is the standard bearer for all outliner apps on the market today. Of all the outliner apps on the market today, OmniOutliner is in rarefied air…nonpareil!